Thursday, June 21, 2007

Using Meta Tags

Web pages are only useful if you have people accessing them. People only come to your site if they know how to get to it. If your site isn't well established then you need to depend on search engines to advertise your pages to the rest of the world. One way of doing that is through the use of Meta Tags.

Most web developers are too focused on creating the page content, they often overlook Meta Tags. Here, I'll discuss some of the commonly used Meta tags.

Description Meta tag describes what the page or site is about. The syntax for this is:

<Meta Name="Description" Content="Page description">

Keywords Meta tag contains the keywords that would be relevant to the page/site. For example:

<Meta Name="Keywords" Content="Web, Programming, Blog">

Description & Keywords often go hand in hand. You could apply this at the site level (all pages have the same descriptions & keywords) or at the page level (all pages have different descriptions and keywords). I’ll talk more about this in search engine ranking blog.

Author Meta contains the name of the person who published the page:

<Meta Name="Author" Content="Brian Dao">

Revisit-After Meta tag tells the web crawlers or spiders to revisit the page after certain period has passed.

<Meta Name="Revisit-After" Content="7 days">

Robots Meta tag can instruct the crawlers to index the page and whether to follow the links found on the site or not:

<Meta Name="Robots" Content="index, follow">

These are just a few things you can do to help published your webpages and get them indexed with the search engines and not optimizing your site for better ranking in search engine index as I'll talk about that in another blog.

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